Public academic prize contests the concours academique played a
significant role in the intellectual life of Enlightenment France,
with aspirants formulating positions on such matters as slavery,
poverty, the education of women, tax reform, and urban renewal and
submitting the resulting essays for scrutiny by panels of judges.
In The Enlightenment in Practice, Jeremy L. Caradonna draws on
archives both in Paris and the provinces to show that thousands of
individuals ranging from elite men and women of letters artisans,
and peasants participated in these intellectual competitions, a far
broader range of people than has been previously assumed.
Caradonna contends that the Enlightenment in France can no
longer be seen as a cultural movement restricted to a small coterie
of philosophers or a limited number of printed texts. Moreover,
Caradonna demonstrates that the French monarchy took academic
competitions quite seriously, sponsoring numerous contests on such
practical matters as deforestation, the quality of drinking water,
and the nighttime illumination of cities. In some cases, the
contests served as an early mechanism for technology transfer: the
state used submissions to identify technical experts to whom it
could turn for advice. Finally, the author shows how this unique
intellectual exercise declined during the upheavals of the French
Revolution, when voicing moderate public criticism became a rather
dangerous act."
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